I think I could read the “rivers and mountains” poetry of ancient China for the rest of my life and want for nothing more. I suspect it has something to do with my fishing, which at its simplest is an excuse to be on the water, observing and being at one with the natural world, contemplating nature, finding tranquility, and being in the moment: fishing as Zen. It might even be a synonym for tenkara. Some make a joke of it: as fishing, Zen is about not catching fish. Or it’s something busy CEOs do to recharge their batteries while outfitters massage their egos and lift their billfolds. But the Zen in my fishing has little to do with the advertising copy in the glossy magazines. Fly fishing can make you feel like a poet, though not necessarily write like one.
The oldest and longest engagement with wilderness in literature goes back to the poets of classical China, who wrote in the so-called “rivers and mountains” tradition. They were the world’s best nature poets. They loved rivers and mountains. And they drank more than Dylan Thomas and Charles Bukowski. Or so it would seem when you read Li Po, China’s thirstiest and best-loved poet. He even has a dive bar named in his honor in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Legend has it that Li Po drowned drunk in a river while attempting to embrace the moon’s reflection in the water. It was the kind of big gesture he went in for.
Sinologists tell us that China’s classical poets really didn’t drink that much — just enough for inspiration and clarity of mind. I’ll have to take their word for that. A lot of their poems seem pickled in alcohol. That art didn’t come out of a twelve-step program.
Chinese poems are small, quiet verses that render immediate experience and deep thoughts. They are spare, limpid, beautiful, and mercifully short. Chinese poets needed only a few lines to express what needed saying. Piggybacking on Chinese culture, Japan’s haiku masters got it down to seventeen syllables. “The Chinese and Japanese traditions,” said Gary Snyder, “carry within them the most sensitive, mind-deepening poetry of the natural world ever written by civilized people.” Nice work if you can get it. And if you can’t, you can always go fishing.
Rivers and fishing abound in Chinese classical poetry. Somebody was always wetting a line. Take Liu Tsung-yuan’s famous poem “River Snow.” It became a staple of landscape paintings, the kind where emotion congeals into a stupendous calm.
A thousand mountains and not a bird flying
ten thousand paths and not a single footprint
an old man in his raincoat in a solitary boat
fishes alone in the freezing river snow
(Translated by Red Pine)
It more than captures a mood. It’s a flash of insight. It’s like your best day on the water. This poetic tradition has its roots in Zen (Chan). Zen is a meditation practice that originated when Mahayana Buddhism spread from India to China (Chan Buddhism) and then Japan (Zen Buddhism) in the medieval period during the Common Era. Zen (Chan) was heavily influenced by a much more ancient Chinese tradition of Taoism dating back to the time of Lao Tzu and Confucius in the sixth century BCE. The goal of Zen meditation is an awakened mind.
Kenneth Rexroth suggested that you could skip the meditation and just go fly fishing. He said it is Zen without all the bother. He wasn’t just talking through his hat, either. Rexroth was a renowned California poet, fly angler, and scholar, one of the first to translate Chinese and Japanese poetry into English. “Whoever wrote the little psalms of the Tao Te Ching,” Rexroth wrote, “believed that the long calm regard of moving water was one of the highest forms of prayer.” He called Izaak Walton “the most Chinese of Western writers.”
Try a little Zen with your fishing. It’s not that hard. Empty your mind. Stop fretting over what fly you need. Now open your eyes and absorb the natural scenes. They are all around you. Lower the barrier between yourself and the riverine landscape. Notice nature being her spontaneous self. The same goes for your consciousness. This is an awakened mind.
No one can be absolutely certain how such ancient meditation practices originated, but it is reasonable to assume they might have come out of Paleolithic hunting and fishing activities. A hunter staking out an animal trail has to remain totally alert and still. So does someone trying to spear a fish. In Paleolithic times, humans probably didn’t see themselves as being distinct from nature. Later on, in agrarian societies, the life of the land, its rivers and forests, would continue to give expression to an awakened consciousness for people not yet distanced from earthly cadences. Zen would come naturally to fishermen, woodcutters, and farmers, at least until the industrial age caught up with the peasantry.
I think Zen finds its freshest expression not so much in fly-casting videos, but in the classical poetry of China and Japan, with their emphasis on nature. (The religious texts are mainly above my pay grade.) I enjoy their rivers and mountains as much as my own. And when I can’t go fishing, I can at least read their poems. Here’s “Reply to a Magistrate,” by Wang Wei.
Late in life, I care for ease alone —
to hell with official concerns.
Look! I make no plans for the future
but to go back to my forest home again.
Let pine winds loosen my robes,
mountain moons play my lute.
You want to taste success or failure?
A lone fisherman sings out on the water.
(Translated by Sam Hamill)
Notice again the fishing motif. It turns up in a lot of Chinese poems. This one is rather famous. Wang Wei was a master of disappearing into pure landscape. He loved to dangle a fishing line and was renowned for both painting and poetry. They say he was the first to paint the inner life of landscape, though none of his canvasses survive. He lived in the early eighth century, during the Tang Dynasty, which nearly everyone agrees was the high point of Chinese civilization. The Tang gave birth to a galaxy of star poets in what was the greatest flowering of lyricism ever to emerge from any world culture. The best of them wrote like Wang Wei in the “rivers and mountains” tradition.
That tradition began three centuries earlier with a pair of poets named Tao Ch’ien and Hsieh Ling-yun, the first Chinese verse masters ever to write in a personal style as a means of rendering direct, immediate experience on the page. Tao Ch’ien invented the “gardens and fields” tradition, as well as a tradition of celebrating wine in verse. Hsieh Ling-yun, who lived in the hills at a higher elevation than Tao, came up with the “rivers and mountains” tradition, but they are essentially the same thing. These two fellows were the first major poets anywhere in the world to engage wilderness and nature on a deeply personal basis, but their poems fell into obscurity after their deaths.
It was Wang Wei, along with his elder contemporary, Meng Hao-jan, both also writing in the first half of the Tang era, who revived the work of these founding poets. Wang Wei, in particular, went on to perfect the kind of pure landscape poem and wilderness meditation that was to flourish throughout the Tang and the Sung period that followed, a tradition that came to its fullest expression in the poems of such superstars as Li Po, Tu Fu, Po Chu-i, and Su Tung-p’o.
Though these poets wrote a thousand years ago, their poems sound completely fresh and contemporary and tell us as much about the human condition as anything written since. They understood humankind’s place in a world where everything is impermanent. Many of their poems describe a kind of sadness and melancholy that arises from a deep empathy for the fleeting beauty in nature, human life, and art. They had compassion for the peasantry and the oppressed. Their landscapes are full of silence, emptiness, and distant sounds. They went from wine-and-poetry galas to just trying to stay alive in times of warfare and famine. And as Chuang Tzu said: “Small fear is fever and worry; great fear is vast and calm.”
The irony is that their “rivers and mountains” poetry was written at the height of classical China’s golden age of cosmopolitan culture. The ancient capital of Chang’an was then the world’s most populous city at a million inhabitants, and its “nature poets” were bureaucrats who worked in town and — like modern-day urban anglers — could get away only on the weekends.
Or on many occasions, they were exiled to the boondocks after some political crime, blunder, or faux pas. Many a poet who got on the wrong side of the emperor and his court ended up reassigned to a distant outpost in a frontier province as punishment, even for some trivial offense. It was an occupational hazard, but generated an extensive travel literature. To get there, one had to journey far, often by river, either under sail or towed up the rapids on ropes. That might explain a lot of the river imagery in their poems.
The intelligentsia made up China’s poet class and bureaucracy. Its vast civil service was composed primarily of scholars, and poetry was a major subject on the entrance examination. If you couldn’t write a poem, you couldn’t hold a government job. China’s elite poet-bureaucrats kept a foot in both worlds. As civil servants, they were devoted to the Confucian ideals of governance. As poets, they were drawn to wandering in the mountains and staying in Buddhist temples and Taoist hermitages that doubled as wayfarer inns. When they weren’t busy acting as prefects, magistrates, and provincial governors, they were deep in a forest or high on a mountaintop, meditating and pretending to be recluses. Many who soured on politics gave up their sinecures and retired to the countryside, only to go back into service later on — the rules were flexible, and even exiles had a right of return. So these poets got in a lot of face time with nature. It’s why their poems are filled with bird song and the sound of falling water.
In the Western tradition, classical poets stood apart from nature or used it as a stage to act out purely human dramas. In the East, nature and the poet-scribe were one and indivisible. This way of seeing the world came out of Taoism and its concept of “the Way.” Tao originally meant “path,” as in “pathway” or “roadway,” and still retains those meanings. But in Taoism, the Way has also come to mean something like “nature’s path” or natural law, the process by which all things in the universe arise and pass away.
You could, if you were so inclined as a fly fisher, even see the Tao as a river, seemingly eternal, but constantly in motion, always changing and transforming into something new. Little wonder Li Po longed to dunk bait and Wang Wei to wet a line. The key to this (in poetry and fishing) is the Taoist notion of wu wei, a state of nonaction, a kind of effortless ebb and flow where you invite the world inside you by surrendering to nature’s cycles and rhythms.
“Fly fishing is Taoism in simple and fascinating action,” wrote Kenneth Rexroth. “If you let it, it produces, and by natural methods, the same results, the crystal clear calm of heart that so many people seek by so much more difficult means.” You could study a lifetime to be a Zen master or simply take up fly fishing. “It combines all of the virtues,” Rexroth wrote, “and none of the strains and responsibilities of art or mysticism.”
Rexroth felt closer to the Tang and Sung poets than to any others in world literature. Their celebration of wilderness held great appeal for a fly fisher like him. And like those master poets, he, too, knew a great deal about human suffering and the burdens of art. But he also knew how to travel light, as when he fished for trout in the Sierra Nevada.
“Many sports are actually forms of contemplative activity,” he wrote.” “Fishing in quiet waters is especially so.” We Westerners, he insisted, miss the point of the Taoist sage who fished only with a straight pin and a single filament of silk. “It’s not that he did not catch fish, but that he caught them with ease, because he was perfectly attuned to the rhythms of water and life.” No dogma or belief is necessary. Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism are sometimes referred to as “godless religions” or “secular spiritualisms,” in that they do not admit to any deity or supernatural agency behind the universe. This philosophy, while deeply spiritual, is essentially based on empirical observation and in accord with modern scientific understanding, especially as it relates to ecological science. It seems tailor-made for today’s “scientific angler.” It can even be seen as the original “deep ecology” that goes beyond mere stewardship to embrace the idea that everything in nature has inherent value, regardless of its usefulness to humankind, and that we are only a small part of a boundless universe.
We who have spent time on the water know that fly fishing requires a continual alert responsiveness to the particulars of an ever-changing situation. If that doesn’t describe being in the moment, I don’t know what does. So let a trout stream be your zendo. Slip into tranquility without sitting zazen. And may “Match the hatch” be your koan. If you solve it, you catch fish.
Of course, not every day on the water will be Zenlike. Like last Saturday, with its blown casts, wind knots, my fly hanging in the bushes, and my leaky waders. Truly, I was at two with nature. I did, however, feel like a Tang poet. I needed a drink.
And then — thinking I might make like Li Po and head for the nearest tavern — from out of nowhere, like a sudden flash of deep insight, a trout smacks my fly, erupts in a shower of diamond droplets, and promptly throws the hook.
If that was “mindfulness,” I wanted more.
Credits:
Liu Tsung-yuan, “River Snow” from Written in Exile: The Poetry of Liu Tsung-yuan, translated by Red Pine. Copyright © 2019 by Red Pine. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, coppercanyonpress.org.
Wang Wei, “Reply to a Magistrate” from Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese, translated by Sam Hamill. Copyright © 2000 by Sam Hamill. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Tiger Bark Press, tigerbarkpress.com.
